Dark Times
by Lord Raine
Summary: Seeking his ultimate fate after solving the mystery of his own murder, Harry Dresden is flung back in time by Uriel to set right the imbalances created by the Fallen. Can he save a fracturing world from it's doom? And what might it cost him to do so?


Dark Times

Chapter 1

By Lord Raine

Disclaimer: I don't own the Dresden Files, nor do I own the popular sport known as Torturing Harry Dresden.

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><p>I pushed open the door, the bell sounding high and cheerful, and a cold gust of wind practically pushed me into the store. It was a Dunkin Doughnuts, one of the newer ones that just opened. You could tell it was new not just because everything was shockingly clean, but because the layout was borrowing pages from the textbook on how to make a diner. There were brightly upholstered booths, healthy clusters of potted plants, and smiling, competent employees who would actually walk out from behind the counter and wait on you while you were seated. All of it came together to make the sort of picture that executives dream about when they say things like 'corporate initiative' and 'progressive workspace.' I wasn't in the mood to feel around and check, but I'd be willing to bet dollars to freshly baked doughnuts that the place was laid out in accordance with the latest fads in feng shui. It didn't have the mellow vib of Mac's place, but it felt like it was trying really hard to get there, and for something that was ultimately the product of a corporate boardroom, 'almost feng shui' was the equivalent of a half court slam dunk.<p>

The wiseass in me notes that the really good doughnut shop is less than a block away from the main building of the Chicago Police Department. The cynic in me is pretty sure that the money I'm about to put down is going to Marcone, someway and somehow, because most of the nice things we have left in this town can be traced back to him, and arranging things so he gets daily contributions from the very cops who are trying to take him down sounds like the sort of thing he would do.

Fuck it. I need the caffeine.

I ambled up to the counter and ordered a box of doughnuts and a large coffee, black. That's one thing I like about the doughnut shops. They don't beat around the bush when it comes to the nectar of the gods. You can keep your frappichinos and supurla lattes. If I can't spell it, then it's not on the menu. Breakfast is serious business. Nothing that sounds like it's from France needs to be involved. My morning ritual needs some backbone to it, not something that sounds like it might be some kind of pedicure treatment that my brother would get before going out on a hot date.

The lady behind the cash register smiled brightly as she took my order. She was blond, somewhat leggy, and wearing the same apron and long skirt outfit that all of the female employees were wearing. A paper hat straight out of the fifties and a white, too-cheerful smile completed the ensemble. She had the body of a cheerleader, thin and athletic, and given the small pink acne dots desperately battling against her makeup, she looked young enough to be one. It wouldn't surprise me if she was. The college campus isn't that far from here, and working the doughnut shop would be a pretty decent part-time job for a college student. I should mention her to Will, ask if he knows her from around.

Oh wait, that's right. No, he wouldn't. Will isn't in college yet.

I should probably start from the beginning.

My name is Harry Dresden. I'm a wizard. I died, and now I'm back in time.

Yeah. If you need a cup of coffee too, I can wait. It's been that sort of day.

The long and short of it is that I died. I wound up in what I can only assume was Purgatory, talked to a few dead guys I knew, and got assigned the job of tracking down my own murderer. So right out the gate, I knew I was in trouble. Any case that starts out with the plot of a made-for-tv movie can't possibly end well. But this one went to shit in ways that redefined my own understanding of the term, which is really saying something, seeing how my standards are epic even among other wizards.

I came back as a ghost, which sounds cool until you realize that you can't interact with anything in any meaningful way at all, you're totally invisible and undetectable to over 99% of the human population, and light from the sun is about as healthy for you as the A-Bomb was for that one two story house that they always show in the stock footage of a nuke going off. You know, the one that disintegrates, is set on fire, and then disintegrates some more in the span of about half a second, just to remind you that physics really doesn't mess around.

So. I got to solve my own murder, only I can't do anything useful, talk to anyone who could potentially help me, or otherwise do any of the sorts of things that one would typically associate with private investigation. I couldn't even ghost through walls into people's houses to spy on them, because suddenly thresholds are walls of iron, and not minor inconveniences. Somehow, mostly through dumb luck, I stumbled through it. I was not at all aided or abetted by the state of the world in general, which seemed dead-set on proving true that age old adage of the wizard taking a vacation and then coming back to the motherfucking apocalypse.

As it turns out, an hour and a half in Purgatory is equivalent to six months for real boys and girls who aren't having out-of-dimension experiences. In that time, just about everything that could have conceivably gone wrong did so, and in a manner that would have been objectively fascinating to watch if it hadn't been so personal and horrifying. The White Council, which is what passes for wizarding justice in the world, was disorganized, severely weakened, and failing faster than a blind kid taking his driving exam. All over the world, people who had some talent or sense for the supernatural were disappearing, spirited away by dark forces unknown. The fairies were gearing up for war, more than ready to kick off the next ice age or global pandemic in the process, and the mortal agents of demons and fallen angels were making aggressive moves against their counterparts in the church and elsewhere.

And to top it all off, everyone I had known when I was alive was at least five fries short of a happy meal. Several of them were missing the burgers, too. My apprentice Molly was a murderer and a _real_ warlock, not just the "I did black magic without realizing it was wrong" kind, Murphy was off the force and doing her best impression of Batman, if Batman had no qualms about shooting bystanders and taking checks from the mafia, my godmother was running around killing random people and being _far_ too cheerful about it while training my aforementioned apprentice in the fine art of the Dark Side of the Force, and the active members of the Carpenter clan were fanatically obsessed with following Murphy into the jaws of morally dubious vigilantism.

That's how you know it was bad. When I use the world 'vigilante' with scorn in reference to others. Sure, I've blown up a few buildings in my time. Some of them may have not even necessarily needed to be blown up. But at least they had been for good causes. I don't ever recall doing it after getting a cold look in my eyes and saying something about "acceptable sacrifices."

I'm not gonna lie. It killed a little bit of my heart to watch Murph throw away everything that had ever made her someone who I honestly considered to have superior morals to my own. It almost as hurt as much as hanging my apprentice out to dry and murdering Susan Rodriguez, mother of my only child.

So thus far, just to clarify, monsters are running around abducting people off the streets, hundreds of lesser supernatural forces are fighting over the power vacuum created by the genocide of the Red Court, and everyone I know is either AWOL, insane, depressed, badly injured, proudly wearing a Sith Academy Graduation Badge, or some combination of the above.

Universe 1, Everyone Else 0.

Oh, and pretty much all of it is my fault. I'm the one who went to South America. Power vacuum? My fault. Friends scooting down the fun slide into the ball pit of madness? My fault. All of the abductions and kidnappings? _Also_ my fault, albeit indirectly.

It sounds melodramatic, I know. Oh woe is me, right? But it's all true. I'm the one who turned the blood curse the Red Court vampires were preparing to use against me on the Red Court itself, thereby creating the global power vacuum that motivated all the supernatural infighting. I'm the one who murdered one of the only women I can say I ever really loved to make it happen. I'm the one who said I would cheerfully watch the world and everyone in it burn if it could save my daughter. I'm the one who dragged my cripplingly empathic apprentice into a literal warzone just because I thought I could potentially use the extra muscle. And I'm the one who cut the deal with Mab, which is what made this entire circus possible.

Granted, at the time, I hadn't thought about any of that. I had only been thinking about doing whatever it took to save my little girl. But not thinking and going with your knee-jerk reaction is the start of most criminals. I don't see why I would be any different. Even the state of Chicago specifically was my fault. Apparently, my reputation held a hell of a lot of nasties back. I had no idea my mere presence in Chicago was making that much of a difference, but just like how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, not being aware of the consequences of my actions doesn't exempt me from the blame. After all, I'd only ever done any of it with good intentions in mind, hadn't I? And look where it got me. The Chicago I knew was never perfect, but it wasn't a freaking _warzone_. This new one was. Six months gone, and the world looked like the bastard child of the Hallmark channel and a post-apocalyptic dystopia. And there I was in the middle of it all, floating along and not being able to do anything about it.

It's like Uriel said. "Let the world burn" is a lot easier to say than "let Molly Carpenter burn," or "let Karrin Murphy burn." The world is impersonal. Nobody gives a damn about the world. It doesn't work the same way once names start getting involved.

Speaking of Mr. Sunshine, he's the reason I'm here. So I stumble through this minefield of utterly impossible restrictions and tasks, storm the beaches of Normandy, square off against NaziBob McKemmler, lead a horde of Chicago's most dangerous and violent specters and apparitions into a supernatural fortress, watch them all get eaten by a person I had really hoped was dead for real, and then had a Lord of the Rings meets every science fiction novella and fan-made ficlet battle in the center of my apprentice's mind for the fate of the galaxy. Or something. Honestly, by that point my bullshit meter was pretty much maxed out, so I was kind of ballparking things as far as details went. What matters is that, totally by accident (surprise!), I found out who my murderer was. Me! Which I really should have seen coming, all things considered. That guy is such an asshole.

Unfortunately, that particular revelation was a lot less zen than it sounds. As it turns out, I had done yet more incredibly inappropriate and irresponsible things with my apprentice that did not in the least bit involve things that would interest Bob. Arranging your own assassination and then dumping the responsibility of erasing that fact from your mind onto your impressionable, unstable, post-traumatically stressed teenage apprentice is a dick move no matter what century or school of thought you're from.

Then everything freezes in place, just to remind me that I'm still in a made-for-tv movie, and along comes Mr. Sunshine himself to take me by the hand and guide me to my ultimate fate. Color me Ghost of Christmas Surprised. He explains that, apparently, there is a cosmological imbalance in play thanks to repeated meddling by one of the Fallen and some Outsiders who managed to get a foot in the door, and as God's personal spook, it was somewhere in his job description to rebalance the scales.

He then muttered something about how pissed 'she' is going to be about this, pulls a giant sword out of nowhere, and runs me through.

If you're concerned about me breaking down into a sobbing wreck of fear, relief, nerves, confusion, and general emotional turmoil, don't. I already got all of that out of my system when I woke up in my not-incinerated bed, in my not-burned-to-the-ground apartment, surrounded by my not-annihilated things and with my still-present hyperthyroid cat purring on my legs. That's why I'm here for breakfast. I may sound all cool and suave and controlled, but the fact of the matter is that I wouldn't trust myself with a butter knife at the moment, let alone a stove and boiling water. I'm honestly surprised I even made the drive over here without taking out fifteen pedestrians and a storefront. Only part of that is because I had never thought I'd see my car again outside of a political ad for supporting industrial recycling, let alone that I would have the opportunity to drive it through a Chicago that did not obliquely resemble the setting of a _Mad Max_ film.

So yeah. My name is Harry Dresden. I'm a wizard. I died, and now I'm back in time.

The busty cashier finally comes out with my order, fresh off the doughnut assembly line, and puts down a giant styrofoam cup that wouldn't look out of place in an Irish pub. Coffee by the pint? God bless America. She cheerfully broke my twenty, cheerfully handed me back my change, and cheerfully bustled off to help some other customer who had an early morning cheer deficiency. I absently pocketed the money, picked up my plastic tray, and went off to stake a claim at one of the booths.

I had a lot of things to think about.

The paper I had bought just outside the shop informed me of the date. Normally, that would have told me a lot. But it didn't tell me nearly as much as the appointment on my calendar to meet one Monica Sells later today at my office.

Uriel had sent me back to the beginning of the Shadowman case. The beginning of what I, and several others, had suspected to be the opening moves of the dubiously titled 'Black Council,' a collection of frighteningly powerful and well-connected individuals. All we had on them is that they were bad news, had at least three wizards on their payroll, and were good enough to remain totally invisible on our radar, which is scary enough as it is. We had suspected that they were behind the various surges of Dark Arts that had been happening recently, but we didn't have anything concrete to pin on them. Of course, then again, we didn't have any concrete proof that the Black Council even existed, so that's not really all that surprising.

Victor Sells was as far back in my timeline as I could draw the Black Council's influence. It couldn't possibly be a coincidence that Uriel had sent me back exactly this far. That was simultaneously comforting and terrifying. It was comforting because it means I have a shot at fixing a lot of things I had been wallowing in despair over. And it's terrifying because it means that whatever illegal meddling the Outsiders and Fallen had been up to, it stretched back this far. This was, from my time-traveled perspective, _years_ ago. The idea that I may have been passively influenced by entities of that caliber for that long scared me.

I was also terrified for completely different reasons. I had transgressed upon time. One of the Laws of Magic is, and I'm quoting here, "Thou Shall Not Transgress Upon Time." Now, strictly speaking, _I_ didn't do it. Uriel did it _to_ me, and I was just sort of standing there with the sort of expression that one has on their face when they get run through by a giant holy lightsaber. However, I very much doubt that the White Council is going to care about that distinction. Nor, for that matter, will Morgan, who thanks to my time travel shenanigans, is alive and back to the rabid attack dog I remember from my teenage and young-adult years.

I took a long pull at my coffee, and started in on the doughnuts. I'm not going to lie. I'm in trouble. Real, serious trouble. The kind of trouble where even if I just got in my car and started driving without looking back, it would still catch up to me.

This heavenly dose of ambrosia isn't the first brainstorm I've had about the circumstances I've found myself in. In fact, it's pretty much all I've been thinking about since I stopped hugging the floor of my apartment and sobbing incoherently. And the conclusions I've been drawing are not sunshine and rainbows. On the one hand, I've got a second shot. How many people in the world would literally be willing to sell their souls for a second shot at life? And here I just had it _handed_ to me by an archangel. Granted, I know he's playing me as a piece on a cosmic chessboard, and I know that the only reason I'm getting it is because whatever entities are playing on the other side cheated and moved some pieces around when Uriel and God Almighty weren't looking (or, more likely, couldn't do anything about it), but still. A second shot. Hell's freaking bells, man. _A second shot._

On the other hand, though, there are about a billion different ways this could go horribly, horribly wrong. Morgan is one of them. I'm a time traveler now. Transgressing Time is against the Laws of Magic. And even though it was technically Uriel who did the Transgressing, I very much doubt the Council, or Morgan, for that matter, is going to believe me if I say "but an angel made me do it."

It gets worse, though. Time is not really linear. Not for powerful spirit beings like Uriel. It's a lot less like a line, and a lot more like a sea. You can swim backwards, forwards, sideways, up, down, and any other which way you want. Time is a three-dimensional space for them, just like the world around us is for us mere mortals. And that's important, because it means that any spiritual entity of sufficient power is going to be able to figure out that I've traveled through time just by looking at me. And any such entity that that I personally met the first time around is going to know that I've done it _already_, because they're going to have memories of me from the future. I've already verified this. I wasn't the only one thrilled to see the apartment back, after all. It took ten minutes for me to get Bob to shut up about his romance novel collection being intact, and it took half that long for him to explain the incredibly terrifying details of my situation.

According to Bob, any sufficiently spiritual entity of a certain level of power and above is going to know I've given Old Man Time the finger just by looking at me. And any that I've met in person are going to know already.

I've met a _lot_ of powerful spiritual entities. Most of them want me dead. The rest I wouldn't trust to hold a bread knife for me, let alone with information that would make the White Council go Inquisition on my ass.

So not only do I have the very serious problem of keeping my chronologically-challenged misadventures secret from the Council, but I've also got to worry about every really dangerous nasty I've ever tangled with potentially dropping out of nowhere to make my life a living hell. I've already got plans to contact Forthill. We originally met a few months from now, when I needed help putting together the gear for an exorcism. I'm going to need his help a whole hell of a lot sooner this time. According to Bob, the Fallen Angels trapped in the thirty pieces of silver should count as sufficiently everything necessary to remember me, which means I have to assume that I'm probably going to get a visit from Satan's Spare Change Brigade at some point in the very near future. I have absolutely no way to track the Denarians, and even fewer ways to fight them off if they come at me en-masse. I'm going to need backup. Angry, Excalibur-wielding backup.

And that's just the beginning of my problems. It may be spring in Chicago, and we may be getting cold weather coming down from Canada, but I don't remember there being this much snow on the ground last time. And there aren't that many "she's" that Uriel could have been referring to. I may not have technically finished my public school education, but I'm great at math. One plus one equals my ass not going anywhere near the Nevernever. See? Math. The knowledge of how to use and manipulate the Ways that I gleaned from my mother's memory gem is of incalculable value. That being said, no amount of reduction in air fare is worth being Lloyd Slated by an angry Sidhe queen.

Hell, I'm even in trouble on the mundane side of things. I know exactly how all the cases I'm going to get for the next few years are going to go. I know the identities of all the perps, I know the where's and the why's, and I know all the motives and angles that got worked. You'd think, in my line of work, that that would be a tremendous boon. It's like getting an all-inclusive cheat-sheet to life.

Except not. I'm dealing with cases of kidnapping, murder, and theft. Police are involved. I'm consulting. If I solve the cases and do well on them, me and Murph and all the rest of Special Investigations live to fight another day and take the mickey out of the corrupt city officials who are trying to get us all fired and deported. If I solve the cases _too_ well, I go from "valuable investigative asset" to "suspect number one." So I can be good at my job, but if I'm too good, it's my ass. And nobody believes in magic, so the truth isn't going to help me at all. Murph and I had a mutual respect and trust for each other. Key word being 'had.' At this point in time, I'm not her personal ruggedly handsome and darkly sexy private eye that she can flirt with and drag off for drinks after we kill a warehouse full of vampires. I'm some guy she doesn't fully trust, doesn't totally believe, and is not totally convinced is worth the money to call in.

So if the Council doesn't kill me, the Denarians will, and if the Denarians don't kill me, then Mab will, and if Mab doesn't kill me, any one of the dozens of frighteningly dangerous supernatural monsters that I've pissed off over the years will. And if, by some miracle, I manage to escape all of that, if by some miracle the Council doesn't find out about me by asking around in the Nevernever or from me shooting my mouth off or any of the other thousand ways I could blow my cover, I still run the risk of getting my ass locked up in a CPD holding cell for kidnapping, murder, smuggling, rape, or any other of the myriad different things I could be accused of for knowing all the details of each and every one of the cases that will cross my desk before they happen.

So yeah, like I said. I'm in trouble. And the truth isn't going to be worth a damn to anybody who could ruin my day over this, either, so coming clean isn't even an option. As a general rule of thumb, "but an angel made me do it" is about as readily accepted by the magical authorities as it is the mundane ones.

I took a pull at my barrel of coffee and sighed. Half the doughnuts were gone already. I had been planning on taking the rest home to eat later, but I was absolutely starving.

Plans. I was trying not to get swamped by them. It was hard. A lot harder than you might think. I was planning on intervening and saving SplatterCon! without anyone having to get hurt. I was planning on somehow getting Molly under my wing before she can mindrape-with-good-intentions two of her friends and get both of us saddled with the Doom of Damocles. I was planning on exposing the arms buildup of the Red Court in a way that puts them in violation of the accords, and not the White Council. I was planning on Kim, Susan, MacFinn, Carmichael, Kirby, and a fair few others not dying horrible and undeserved deaths.

Stop. Deep breaths. I took a long sip of my coffee, and munched on one of my doughnuts. If you try to juggle twenty knives, you end up stabbed to death. I had a thousand half-formed plans and vague ideas, none of which had coalesced into anything viable but all of which were crowding my thoughts. I have enough to worry about in the very immediate future. I don't have to be planning just yet about what I'm going to do about SplatterCon!, the Red Court, or Mab. In a few hours, Murphy is going to call me to come investigate the remains of Jennifer Stanton and Tommy Tomm, who died late last night, sometime conveniently after everyone else had gone to bed but before I enjoyed my back to the past boot to the face. I was going to take a good look at the crime scene, collect what clues I would need to draw my end conclusion, and somehow not give away the fact that I already know exactly how all of it went down, who is involved, and what they're after.

Chicago PD trains their officers to tell when people are trying to lie or conceal the truth. Stars and stones, but this was going to be one of those days.

Fortunately for the future, and for my rapidly fraying nerves, I had some breathing room. The most immediate threat was dark wizard wannabe and amateur alchemist, Victor Sells. And to be completely honest, I'm not that worried about him. While it is true that some wizards are born more magically brawny than others, the true measure of a wizard is in their experience and knowledge. I know _far_ more about magic now than I did the first time I squared off with him. During my time with the Wardens, I'd put down dozens of warlocks of about the same caliber as Sells, and my skills at fine control and the subtle manipulation of energies had increased geometrically since I took on Molly as an apprentice.

Don't get me wrong, Sells had clearly been backed by someone powerful. You don't find the kind of black magic he was using at the local wicca outlet, or even in the few stores that sell genuine magical curiosities. Real, genuine Dark Wizards don't just sprout up like mushrooms, which is part of the reason why I had fingered him as being a stooge for the Black Council. He clearly had, or has now, I suppose, a powerful patron giving him lessons and resources. No rank amateur could have invented the ThreeEye formula on their own. You don't just stumble onto that sort of thing. And when he was channeling thunderstorms, he was able to throw around more power than anyone else alive that I knew, with the possible exceptions of the Merlin, Cowl, and my grandfather.

But, in spite of all of that, Sells was still, at heart, a novice. He was green. A new kid. He had a few bits of dark magic that he knew how to do, and his arsenal did not extend beyond that. He had never been given any sort of formal education in the magical arts. I proved that the first time around by sucker-punching him when he tried to gloat about siccing a demon after me. Sells against me wasn't really all that fair of a fight the first time around. This time, I wasn't just stronger and smarter. I knew absolutely everything about him and his operation, while he knew nothing whatsoever about what I could really do.

So like I said. I'm not worried about Sells. Occam's Razor and KISS are in full effect for now. My plan for dealing with Mr. Shadowman consists primarily of 'stopping him before he kills anyone else, and doing so without blowing my cover as a time traveler.' Oh, and without getting murdered by Morgan for some perceived slight of black magic.

So for now, I've got some breathing room. Nothing incredibly bad is going to happen immediately, provided I keep my cool, don't try taking a stroll through the Nevernever, and don't start publicly knowing about a bunch of supernatural crimes before they happen.

I took another deep pull from my coffee, and sent another doughnut to pastry heaven. The blond girl who had been my cashier bustled by, practically radiating cheer, and topped off my cup. I'll have to remember to tip her. Good service is hard to find.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm more concerned about what to do long-term. I'm going to need help, and no offense to padre, but Forthill just isn't going to cut it for the long haul. He's got connections, but Michael and his brother knights have full-time jobs to do. I can't expect them to play detail service for me, even if they were willing to do it.

My biggest problem, if we ignore the Denarians, who the Knights will probably be able to keep away, and Mab, who isn't too much of a concern so long as I don't decide to go on any jaunts through looking-glasses, is the Red Court. It was made expressly clear the first time around that they had been preparing to go to war against the White Council for a long time. As much as I'm sure my detractors on the Council would like to say to the contrary, I'm not really the one who sent us to war. I was the excuse that the Reds used to _go_ to war. If it hadn't been me, they would have engineered some other excuse. I was just handy and happened to be around. So even if I keep my nose completely clean, ignore them, and let them do whatever, we will still wind up going to war at some point.

That means that the goal isn't to avoid war. It's to go to war on _our_ terms, not theirs.

Let's get one thing clear, though. Bianca dies. So does Ortega. And his whore. And the Red King. I won't sacrifice any more lives to my cause, but I'm not going to stand around and let the Red Court do whatever the hell they like. They aren't going to drag any more kids out of their beds and stuff apples in their mouths. They aren't going to seduce misguided teens off the streets for their blood orgies. I've ended the Red Court once before. I can do it again.

Granted, I have options on that front. There are different ways to go about it. One of them, obviously, is the way I did it last time. The blood curse the Red King was planning on using was a hell of a thing, but like most really powerful magics, it was pretty straightforward and simple once you get down to the actual building blocks of the spell itself. It's thaumaturgy. Act something on a piece of the whole, and the whole it is from will respond in kind. And I've always been best at thaumaturgy. Maggie was my daughter, and I was Ebenezar's grandson. As far as blood was concerned, Maggie was a smaller part of me, and I was a smaller part of Ebenezar. Do something to her, and it hits me and the old man as well.

It's a thing cast from the same mold as what Sells is doing, really. The biggest requirement for it is power, and thanks to the confluence that was happening at Chichén Itzá, that was covered in spades. It's been said before, but the real power of a wizard is in their ability to plan ahead. Give a wizard, or any decently competent practitioner, enough time to work things out and set things up, and there's almost nothing we can't do.

Last time, there was no time to do anything. I had to use the ritual as it was constructed by the Red King, and he had built it so that the curse would travel up the bloodline. But it should not, in theory, be that difficult to modify it so that it travels _down_ instead. If I could somehow modify that ritual so that the curse travels in the opposite direction, then killing the Red King would set off a chain reaction that would kill every single Red Court vampire in the world, and purify everyone like Susan and Martin, who were halfway between. Then it would just be a matter of sucker punching what amounts to a god.

I've done worse things.

I sighed, and put my hands in my pockets, fiddling with my change. This was all assuming, of course, that everything played out the way it did last time. It wouldn't. I was going to make sure of that. I loved Susan. I really did. But it was probably best for her if we never got involved. She would keep her job and her passion at reporting, she would never wind up getting turned into a monster, and. . . and my daughter would never be born.

But there would still be the gathering at Chichén Itzá. Chichén Itzá is a place where multiple major leylines intersect and converge. It's a major nexus of supernatural power, one of only seven in the entire world. And just like how there are tides and seasons, the leylines also have their own cycles. The confluence of Chichén Itzá was a major event. It only happens once every thousand years, and you can spin a frightening amount of power out of something like that. The Darkhallow was playing with enough power to elevate a mortal to godhood, but this would be almost three times that. And the Red Court controls that entire area. Hell, Chichén Itzá was _built_ by their slaves. By every supernatural law and custom, they literally owned the place. There was no way they wouldn't use the confluence when it happened. Even if Maggie had never been born, the Red Court was still banking on being at war with the White Council by then. They were going to use it for something. Maybe they would try to take out the Merlin. Maybe the Red King would use it to elevate more of his trusted warriors and advisers into Lords of Outer Night. There were a lot of nasty things they could do with that power.

The confluence would still happen. The Red Court would still gather at Chichén Itzá. The Red King would still be there. All of the Lords of Outer Night would be there. It would just be a matter of getting in, enacting my ritual, and taking out the Red King.

_The Darkhallow._

I stopped, my finger still thumbing one of the quarters in my pocket. The Darkhallow. _Everyone_ who mattered would be there. The Red King. The Lords of Outer Night. The entire matching set of Red Court nobility. _Everyone_.

Now there was an idea.

It. . . it should be possible. The biggest problem with the Darkhallow is that you need a hell of a lot of power to kick it off. Kemmler's disciples were going to use All Hallow's Eve to jump-start the process, and summon the Wild Hunt to saturate the surrounding area with enough supernatural energy to get the rest of the way, but it wasn't really required. The Word of Kemmler had been very specific on that point. Kemmler had noted the Wild Hunt as being the most convenient source of the power necessary to start it, but that was just a recommendation. You just need 'a' confluence of power, not that one specifically. It was never really about the Erlking and his Wild Hunt. The Hallow pulls in all the supernatural power from the surrounding area and channels it into a single vessel; the initiator of the Darkhallow. Calling up the Hunt was just the most convenient way to get enough supernatural energy into the area to make the ascension viable.

They were all going to gather at Chichén Itzá. Ground zero for the largest confluence in a thousand years.

Ground zero for a potential Darkhallow.

I wouldn't have to summon the Wild Hunt for this. The Erlking was incredibly powerful, powerful enough to be a peer of Mab herself, but Chichén Itzá would be channeling enough energy to give Uriel a bloody nose. Everything would already be primed and ready. All it would take is the trigger to set it off, and the life force of everything in five miles of Chichén Itzá would be drawn into the rite bearer and subsumed into their own power.

There was a certain poetic justice in destroying the Red Court by eating them. And I already had all the tools I would need to pull it off.

I shook my head distractedly, a faint buzzing in my ears. No, that was insane. It would take out the Red King and every other player in the Red Court, sure, but there were villages in driving distance of it. Even if I wanted to go through with it, there would be innocent casualties. Even if I wanted to become a living god.

_It would solve all of your problems_.

It would. It. . . would solve nearly all of my problems. I wouldn't have to worry about Mab. She'd leave me alone just to avoid a confrontation that had decent odds of getting her killed. The Denarians wouldn't dare mess with me. Not when I could crush their mortal vessels to dust and fling their coins into deep space. And nobody, but _nobody_ would mess with Chicago. Not while Harry Dresden, newly minted God of Magic and Wiseassery, was paying taxes there. It's safe to say that the White Council wouldn't have anything to do with me, but they wouldn't have the power to stop me, either. If they had the power to go through with a hit on a god, they wouldn't have been so panicked about stopping Kemmler. If I pulled off a Darkhallow, they wouldn't mess with me just for the fact that I could kill every last one of them in about the time it took me to order my doughnuts. They'd hate me for it, but what else is new? I can live with the White Council hating me and calling me a monster. I'd put up with that for all of my adult life.

_No_. What the hell was I thinking! This was insane. I shook my head, and stood up, stretching. The Darkhallow was totally out of the question. Necromancy was a violation of absolutely everything that I personally believed in, and I followed my own rules a hell of a lot more strictly than I did anyone else's. Giving Sue the kiss of life for a joyride had been one thing. That had been necessary, and, I'm not going to lie, fucking awesome. But this was totally unnecessary and very, very self-serving. Magic existed to help people. Magic was born from life. I'm not about to use it to help myself. Not that blatantly. If I wanted to serve myself with magic, I'd bone up on alchemy and start making gold, or something. God knows I could use it to pay the rent.

I shook my head, tucked my paper under my arm, grabbed my empty doughnut box, and dropped it in the trash. We're called the Magi for a reason. We're supposed to be the Wise, not the Greedy. No way. The Darkhallow was totally out of the question. The reversal of the blood curse was a much more palatable option. Sure, it would be insanely dangerous, and sure, I would have to figure out a way to sucker punch an entity that hits in the same general weight class as freaking Odin, but stupidly dangerous and nearly impossible is pretty much all I'd been dealing with for the past few years. Hell, it's why I was here _now_. I'd figure something out.

I ambled back over to my booth and reached into my pocket, pulling out the spare change I had to leave the serving girl a tip.

I froze.

There, sitting in the palm of my hand with the rest of the quarters, was a small coin. It had the exact same weight and feel of a quarter, but it was most definitely, definitely not a quarter.

It was a denarius. A silver, Roman denarius. The side that was facing up had been blackened, as though it had been exposed to a fire, but a sigil in angelic script shone clear silver through the color. I recognized the sigil. I knew it all too well.

The bottom of my stomach dropped out, and my blood ran utterly cold. I was holding one of the Denarian coins. _**I was holding Lasciel's coin**_.

I turned my head slowly, carefully, and looked back at the front of the store. The girl who had waited on me was standing there, smiling cheerfully, conspicuously doing absolutely nothing at all. Only now did I notice that no one seemed to notice her. Not the late-shift cop eating a bagel at the counter. Not the truck driver three tables over. Not the manager in the back. No one spoke to her. No one even glanced at her.

Her smile widened, and for an instant, the illusion dropped. Her already-impressive bust swelled to triple it's size, and her skin was bright, vibrant scarlet. Her hair was as black as ink, and hung down to the small of her back, and her legs transformed into those of a goat mid-thigh, cloven hooves and all. Black, batlike wings curled around her back, and a thin, fleshy tail waved sensuously behind her, topped with a classic devil's spade. She stood tall enough to look me square in the face, and the forward pointing ram's horns added a few more inches on top of that. Her eyes were blood red and visibly glowing, and her sclera were jet black. Above them was a second pair of eyes that looked less like eyes and more like horizontal rips in her skin, gashes that exposed a violently burning green inferno.

The only things preserving her modesty were a small paper hat nestled between her horns, and the Dunkin Doughnuts apron.

It didn't reach past her navel.

Memories of a dark night and a boat ride flickered through my mind. It was Rosanna. She was here. _Rosanna_ was _here_ in _Dunkin Doughnuts_ standing _right there_.

A cherry-red tongue slowly licked her full, black lips, and her eyes, all four of them, smoldered with barely-restrained lust. She winked at me, and was gone.

Just, gone. No flash of fire. No rush of air. No sound, no movement. No obvious rend in the air to signify the opening of a Way. She just stopped being there.

I started to shake. My left arm shot out and grabbed at my table to stop me from falling over, and I slowly, slowly sat back down in my booth.

Hell's fucking bells. I'd thought I had time. I'd thought I would have days. They had found me in **_hours_**. They had nailed me completely. I hadn't even been paying _attention_. She had _literally handed me_ the damn coin, and I hadn't even noticed.

I looked at the denarian nestled in my hand. I went back to the lines of thought I'd had while working through my problems and options.

I remembered thumbing through the quarters in my pocket when I did.

"Oh, you _bitch_," I hissed between my teeth, glaring at the coin. "I'd bet you would just _love_ having front row seating in the mind of a godling, wouldn't you?"

The innocuous mental voice that I used when I talked things through in my mind giggled, _giggled_ at me, and the denarian in my hand glittered innocently in the fluorescent light.

I didn't know it was possible for an inanimate object to play coy. I guess it comes with experience.

The part of me that was never able to not be a wiseass, even when it was _really_ not the time, noted that this was entirely my own fault. Call them spare change enough, and they'll eventually start taking it to heart.

God I hate inner-me. That guy is _such_ an asshole.

I grabbed my cup of coffee, crossed the length of the store in four long strides, and opened the door, letting in a rush of cold Chicago air. I hadn't been back a single day, and the situation was already spiraling completely out of my control. I needed to talk to Forthill, I needed to drop off the denarian coin I'd just been slipped, and I needed to upgrade the wards on my apartment to the standards they had been at before the place had been burned down. Knowing my luck, the freaking naagloshii would come through my ceiling if I didn't. It's not like much else could happen to make this worse.

In retrospect, I should have known better than to hand the universe a straight line like that.

I yanked open the driver side door of the Blue Beetle with a snarl and sat down more violently than was strictly necessary. I dropped the napkin-wrapped denarius into one of the cup holders, and jammed my coffee into the other.

I had just put the keys into the ignition when the person in the passenger seat cleared their throat. My head banged into the roof of the Beetle. _Hard_.

I turned my head so fast that I'm pretty sure I gave myself whiplash. When I saw who it was, I didn't care.

A young woman, somewhere in her early twenties, was sitting in the front passenger seat. Her skin was a healthy, tawny brown that spoke of long hours outside in the sun. She was wearing sandals and a thin sundress that was the next best thing to transparent, making me acutely aware of the fact that the sundress and sandals were _all_ she was wearing. Her hair was very long, going down past her waist, and it was a rich, velvety white, traced through with blonde and silver highlights. Her eyes were emerald green and shining with gentle amusement, and her pupils were slitted, like a cat's. It was around then that I noticed that my entire car smelled like pine needles and sunshine, and was a comfortably warm temperature in spite of the abhorrent weather outside.

It was Aurora. The Summer Lady. The High Sidhe Queen that had betrayed Summer in a gambit to unmake pain, destroying the world in the process. I had stopped her. I had killed her. She had been torn apart by iron knives, and I had held her down in the grass while she died.

_**Aurora**_ was **_in my freaking car_** sitting _**right there next to me**_, well within neck-snapping distance.

Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells.

She smiled. "Hello, Harry. Can we talk?"

I'm seriously starting to think that this whole time travel gig is overrated.

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><p>You guys know the drill. Read and review, comments, questions, and criticisms welcome.<p> 


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